A Fuller Day

Tom Kiefer – Gloves

The Fuller Craft Museum is/has been changing (or maybe it’s always been like this and I’m just noticing?) and I’m liking this BIG time. Not only are they showing brill traditional and cutting edge fine art craft, they’re showing work with a soul for justice.

Tom Kiefer – Trail Markers

Fuller Craft Museum is pleased to announce the launch of the Social Impact Exhibition Fund. This revolutionary fund will support socially engaged projects that promote inclusion, social impact, and community wellbeing. In 2017, the world witnessed the power of craft to effect meaningful change as makers from across the globe used their practice for good. (source)

I first noticed the Fuller’s commitment to justice when I was there in January with cousin Della en famiglia. Threads of Resistance was most impressive, the entire show was magnificent.

piles of shoes taken from the soon to be murdered at Auschwitz

For me, the most impressive part of yesterday’s exhibit was Tom Kiefer’s photographic series.

These are the personal effects and belongings of people apprehended in the desert by U.S. Border Patrol agents that were subsequently seized, surrendered, or forfeited as they were processed at a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol facility in southern Arizona. During the course of intake, this property was considered non-essential and discarded. These personal effects and belongings represented their choice of what was important for them to bring as they crossed the border to either start or continue their life in the U.S.
~ Tom Kiefer

Sweet Illusion – Ahrong Kim

Ya know what this molto chillingly reminded me of? Yup my visit to Auschwitz/Birkenau with their displays of huge piles of seized shoes, hair, artificial limbs, eyeglasses and teeth. Unlike Auschwitz, people, HUMANS aren’t intentionally put to death at Trumps’s Hate Resorts and Holiday Cages.  Nope, they're just torn from their children, their loved ones, banged into cages and otherwise abused by the heinously sadistic fuckers in charge.

I’ve been thinking/imagining how I want to express, in paint, my spectacularly fiery outrage over the crimes against humanity happening at our southern border IN OUR NAME WITH OUR TAX DOLLARS. I suspect I’ll channel Käthe Kollwitz by way of Hermann Nitsch and Willem de Kooning.

I suppose this is something to keep my mind busy whilst in that damn MRI tube today.

There were some fun and just beautiful pieces at The Fuller. Balance – gotta have it. There was the anthropomorphous wood carved beasties, some beautiful ceramic functional ware and small sculptures and, my fave, the steel duck.